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  • Black Stack: Men’s Edition Sticker
    $5.00

    Celebrate Black authors with this sticker that highlights prominent Black men writers throughout history! This bookmark honors W.E.B. DuBois, Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Howard Thurman, Ralph Ellison, August Wilson, and Langston Hughes. 1.99" x 3.00" thick, durable, vinyl waterproof sticker! 

  • Black Stack: Women’s Edition Sticker
    $5.00

    Celebrate Black authors with this bookmark that highlights prominent Black women writers throughout history! This bookmark honors Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, bell hooks, Alice Walker, Octavia Butler, Audre Lorde, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Phyllis Wheatley. 2.00" x 3.00" thick, durable, vinyl waterproof sticker! 

  • Black Studies Writing Cafe - September 23 @ 9:30 AM
    $0.00

     

    Join fellows from the University of Houston-Downtown's Center for Social Inquiry and Transformation for a three-hour session of writing, reflection, and community. This writing cafe is hosted in support of our Mellon-funded writing project, Reimagining Black Studies Research and Teaching in an Age of Backlash.  We welcome scholars and graduate students in Black Studies or related disciplines, as well as independent scholars and creatives whose work speaks to or intersects with Black Studies. Attendees are encouraged, but not required, to submit an abstract for consideration to be included in our forthcoming anthologies on research and teaching.

    EVENT DEETS

    When: Tuesday, September 23 @ 9:30 AM

    Where: Kindred Stories (2310 Elgin St, #2,  Houston, TX 77004)

    How: RSVP to reserve your spot.(Limited Space Available) 

     

  • Black Studies Writing Cafe - September 9 @ 9:30 AM
    Sold out

    Join fellows from the University of Houston-Downtown's Center for Social Inquiry and Transformation for a three-hour session of writing, reflection, and community. This writing cafe is hosted in support of our Mellon-funded writing project, Reimagining Black Studies Research and Teaching in an Age of Backlash.  We welcome scholars and graduate students in Black Studies or related disciplines, as well as independent scholars and creatives whose work speaks to or intersects with Black Studies. Attendees are encouraged, but not required, to submit an abstract for consideration to be included in our forthcoming anthologies on research and teaching.

    EVENT DEETS

    When: Tuesday, September 9 @ 9:30 AM

    Where: Kindred Stories (2310 Elgin St, #2,  Houston, TX 77004)

    How: RSVP to reserve your spot.(Limited Space Available) 

     

  • BLACK THOUGHTS: A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS

    Mr. Tomonoshi!

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    BLACK THOUGHTS: A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS is an uncompromising exploration of Black American Futurism, resistance, innovation, and the elevation of Black thought.

    This book does not seek permission—it reclaims the narrative, dismantles historical distortions, and reimagines the Black future on its own terms.

    Through a series of bold and thought-provoking essays, MR. TOMONOSHi! confronts systemic erasure, economic exclusion, and the persistent framing of Black genius within whiteness.

    From the mislabeling of Black innovators as secondary to their white counterparts, to the financial structures that keep Black businesses in perpetual development, this book exposes how systems work against Black success while affirming that Black futurism is the blueprint for radical transformation.

    This work does not simply reflect on history—it challenges perspectives, reshapes narratives, and demands new action. It examines the relationship between Black ingenuity and survival, Black ownership and liberation, Black consumerism and economic power, all while rejecting the constraints imposed by whiteness as the

  • Black Trans Feminism

    by Marquis Bey

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    Marquis Bey offers a meditation on blackness and gender nonnormativity in ways that recalibrate traditional understandings of each, conceiving of black trans feminism as a politics grounded in fugitivity and the subversion of power.

    In Black Trans Feminism Marquis Bey offers a meditation on blackness and gender nonnormativity in ways that recalibrate traditional understandings of each. Theorizing black trans feminism from the vantages of abolition and gender radicality, Bey articulates blackness as a mutiny against racializing categorizations; transness as a nonpredetermined, wayward, and deregulated movement that works toward gender’s destruction; and black feminism as an epistemological method to fracture hegemonic modes of racialized gender. In readings of the essays, interviews, and poems of Alexis Pauline Gumbs, jayy dodd, and Venus Di’Khadijah Selenite, Bey turns black trans feminism away from a politics of gendered embodiment and toward a conception of it as a politics grounded in fugitivity and the subversion of power. Together, blackness and transness actualize themselves as on the run from gender. In this way, Bey presents black trans feminism as a mode of enacting the wholesale dismantling of the world we have been given.
  • Black Trans Lives Matter Pin
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    ALL Black Lives Matter. Support our trans brothers and sisters in every way you can! Proceeds benefit organizations led trans people of color. 

    1.5 inches tall. Soft enamel. Comes with 2 rubber pin backs. 

  • Black TV: Five Decades of Groundbreaking Television from Soul Train to Black-ish and Beyond

    by Bethonie Butler

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    *Ships in 7-10 business days*

    With iconic imagery and engrossing text, Black TV is the first book of its kind to celebrate the groundbreaking, influential, and often under-appreciated shows centered on Black people and their experiences from the last fifty years.
     
    Over the past decade, television has seen an explosion of acclaimed and influential debut storytellers including Issa Rae (Insecure), Donald Glover (Atlanta), and Michaela Coel (I May Destroy You). This golden age of Black television would not be possible without the actors, showrunners, and writers that worked for decades to give voice to the Black experience in America.
     
    Written by veteran TV reporter Bethonie Butler, Black TV tells the stories behind the pioneering series that led to this moment, celebrating the laughs, the drama, and the performances we’ve loved over the last fifty years. Beginning with Julia, the groundbreaking sitcom that made Diahann Carroll the first Black woman to lead a prime-time network series as something other than a servant, she explores the 1960s and 1970s as an era of unprecedented representation, with shows like Soul TrainRootsand The Jeffersons. She unpacks the increasingly nuanced comedies of the 1980s from 227 to A Different World, and how they paved the way for the ’90s Black-sitcom boom that gave us The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Living Single. Butler also looks at the visionary comedians—from Flip Wilson to the Wayans siblings to Dave Chappelle—and connects all these achievements to the latest breakthroughs in television with showrunners like Shonda Rhimes, Ava DuVernay, and Quinta Brunson leading the charge.
     
    With dozens of photographs reminding readers of memorable moments and scenes, Butler revisits breakout performances and important guest appearances, delivering some overdue accolades along the way. So, put on your Hillman sweatshirt, make some popcorn, and get ready for a dyn-o-mite retrospective of the most groundbreaking and entertaining shows in television history.

  • Black Water Rising: A Novel (Jay Porter Series, 1)

    by Attica Locke

    $16.99

    Houston, Texas, 1981. Jay Porter is hardly the lawyer he set out to be. His most promising client is a low-rent call girl and he runs his fledgling law practice out of a dingy strip mall. But he’s long since made peace with not living the American Dream and carefully tucked away his darkest sins: the guns, the FBI file, the trial that nearly destroyed him.

    That is, until the night in a boat out on the bayou when he impulsively saves a woman from drowning—and opens a Pandora’s box. Her secrets put Jay in danger, ensnaring him in a murder investigation that could cost him his practice, his family, and even his life. But before he can get to the bottom of a tangled mystery that reaches into the upper echelons of Houston’s corporate power brokers, Jay must confront the demons of his past.

    With pacing that captures the reader from the first scene through an exhilarating climax, Black Water Rising is a compelling legal thriller that marks the arrival of an electrifying new talent.

  • Black Water Sister
    $17.00

    A finalist for the 2022 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel
    One of BookPage's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of 2021
    One of Tor.com Reviewers' Choice Best Books of 2021
    One of Book Riot's Best SFF Standalones of 2021

    “Ghosts. Gods. Gangsters. Black Water Sister has it all…a wildly entertaining coming-of-age story for the twentysomething set, with a protagonist who is almost painfully relatable at times.”—Vulture

    "A twisty, feminist, and enthralling page-turner."—BuzzFeed

    "A sharp and bittersweet story of past and future, ghosts and gods and family."—Naomi Novik, New York Times bestselling author of A Deadly Education

    A reluctant medium discovers the ties that bind can unleash a dangerous power in this compelling Malaysian-set contemporary fantasy.

      When Jessamyn Teoh starts hearing a voice in her head, she chalks it up to stress. Closeted, broke and jobless, she’s moving back to Malaysia with her parents – a country she last saw when she was a toddler.

    She soon learns the new voice isn’t even hers, it’s the ghost of her estranged grandmother. In life, Ah Ma was a spirit medium, avatar of a mysterious deity called the Black Water Sister. Now she’s determined to settle a score against a business magnate who has offended the god—and she's decided Jess is going to help her do it, whether Jess wants to or not.

    Drawn into a world of gods, ghosts, and family secrets, Jess finds that making deals with capricious spirits is a dangerous business, but dealing with her grandmother is just as complicated. Especially when Ah Ma tries to spy on her personal life, threatens to spill her secrets to her family and uses her body to commit felonies.  As Jess fights for retribution for Ah Ma, she’ll also need to regain control of her body and destiny – or the Black Water Sister may finish her off for good.

  • Black Woman Grief: A Guide to Hope and Wholeness

    Natasha Smith

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    Dear Black woman, you are not alone.

    God has not disregarded your pain and suffering. God sees you. God knows you. God understands.

    In Black Woman Grief, Natasha Smith unearths a painful reality that is tangled within our nation’s roots and DNA: trauma, loss, and grief are embedded in the lived experience of the Black woman in the United States. Smith talks about grief that is specifically applicable to Black women, providing them with affirmation and a safe place to exhale. Yet, amid a broken world and broken systems that have weighed down Black women for generations, Smith reminds us that there is hope because the kingdom of God is at hand. In Black Woman Grief, Natasha Smith

    * takes us readers through narrative and biblical truths
    * provides a space made by and for Black women to be seen and understood by God
    * encourages Black women to live a God-filled life in a grief-filled world

  • Black Women Taught Us: An Intimate History of Black Feminism

    by Jenn M. Jackson

    from $20.00

    PAPERBACK ON SALE DATE: January 13, 2026

    Fearless essays that reclaim the work and words of Black women activists, abolitionists, and movement makers who have long fought for liberation and justice—from a beloved Teen Vogue columnist and an essential new voice in Black feminism.

    Jenn M. Jackson has been known to bring deep historical acuity to some of the most controversial topics in America today. Now, in their first book, Jackson applies their critical analysis to the questions that have long energized their work: Why has Black women's freedom fighting been so overlooked throughout history, and what has our society lost in the meantime? A love letter to those who have been minimized and forgotten, this collection repositions Black women’s intellectual and political work at the center of today’s liberation movements.

    Across thirteen original essays that explore the legacy and work of Black women writers and leaders—from Harriet Jacobs and Ida B. Wells to the Combahee River Collective and Audre Lorde—Jackson sets the record straight about Black women’s longtime movement organizing, theorizing, and coalition building in the name of racial, gender, and sexual justice in the United States and abroad. These essays show, in both critical and deeply personal terms, how Black women have been at the center of modern liberation movements, despite the erasure and misrecognition of their efforts. Jackson illustrates how Black women have frequently done the work of liberation at great risk to their lives and livelihoods.

    For a new generation of movement organizers and potential co-strugglers, Black Women Taught Us serves as a reminder that Black women were the first ones to teach us how to fight racism, how to name that fight, and how to imagine a more just world for all of us. A reclamation of an essential history, and a hopeful gesture towards a better political future, this is what listening to Black women looks like.

  • Black Women Will Save the World: An Anthem

    by April Ryan

    $27.99

    *ships in 7-10 business days*

    In this long-overdue celebration of Black women’s resilience and unheralded strength, the revered, trailblazing White House correspondent reflects on “The Year That Changed Everything”—2020—and African-American women’s unprecedented role in upholding democracy.

    “I am keenly aware that everyone and everything has a story,” April D. Ryan acknowledges. “Also, I have always marveled at Black women and how we work to move mountains and are never really thanked or recognized.” In Black Women Will Save the World, she melds these two truths, creating an inspiring and heart-tugging portrait of one of the momentous years in America, 2020—when America elected its first Black woman Vice President—and celebrates the tenacity, power, and impact of Black women across America.

    From the beginning of the nation to today, Black women have transformed their pain into progress and have been at the frontlines of the nation’s political, social, and economic struggles. These “Sheroes” as Ryan calls them, include current political leaders such as Maxine Waters, Valerie Jarrett, and Kamala Harris; Brittany Packnett Cunningham, LaTosha Brown, and other activists; and artists like Regina King. Combining profiles and in-depth interviews with these influential movers and shakers and many more, Ryan explores the challenges Black women endure, and how the lessons they’ve learned can help us shape our own stories. Ryan also chronicles her personal journey from working-class Baltimore to the elite echelons of journalism and speaks out about the hurdles she faced in becoming one of the most well-connected members of the Washington press corps—while raising two daughters as a single mother in the aftermath of a messy divorce.

    It is time for everyone to acknowledge Black women’s unrivaled contributions to America. Yet our democracy remains in peril, and their work is far from done. Black Women Will Save the World presents a vital kaleidoscopic look at women of different ages and from diverse backgrounds who devote their lives to making the world a better place—even if that means stepping out of their “place.”

  • Black Women Writers at Work

    by Claudia Tate

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    A critical collection of conversations with Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gayl Jones and other Black women writers that changed the scope of Black literature in the 20th century and beyond.

    “Black women writers and critics are acting on the old adage that one must speak for oneself if one wishes to be heard.” —Claudia Tate, from the introduction

    Long out of print, Black Women Writers at Work is a vital contribution to Black literature in the 20th century. 

    Through candid interviews with Maya Angelou, Toni Cade Bambara, Gwendolyn Brooks, Alexis De Veaux, Nikki Giovanni, Kristin Hunter, Gayl Jones, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Sonia Sanchez, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, Margaret Walker, and Sherley Anne Williams, the book highlights the practices and critical linkages between the work and lived experiences of Black women writers whose work laid the foundation for many who have come after.


    Responding to questions about why and for whom they write, and how they perceive their responsibility to their work, to others, and to society, the featured playwrights, poets, novelists, and essayists provide a window into the connections between their lives and their art.

    Finally available for a new generation, this classic work has an urgent message for readers and writers today.

  • Black Women, Black Love: America's War on African American Marriage

    Dianne M Stewart

    $30.00

    A “powerful, persuasive, and devastatingly haunting” examination of America’s racist, centuries-long oppression of Black love (Carol Anderson, bestselling author of White Rage)

    According to the 2010 US census, more than seventy percent of Black women in America are unmarried. Black Women, Black Love reveals how four centuries of laws, policies, and customs have created that crisis.

    Dianne M. Stewart begins in the colonial era, when slave owners denied Blacks the right to marry, divided families, and, in many cases, raped enslaved women and girls. Later, during Reconstruction and the ensuing decades, violence split up couples again as millions embarked on the Great Migration north, where the welfare system mandated that women remain single in order to receive government support. And no institution has forbidden Black love as effectively as the prison-industrial complex, which removes Black men en masse from the pool of marriageable partners.

    Prodigiously researched and deeply felt, Black Women, Black Love reveals how white supremacy has systematically broken the heart of Black America, and it proposes strategies for dismantling the structural forces that have plagued Black love and marriage for centuries.

  • Black Women’s Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds

    Kristin Waters

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    A new edition of a landmark work on Black women’s intellectual traditions.
     
    An astonishing wealth of literary and intellectual work by nineteenth-century Black women is being rediscovered and restored to print in scholarly and popular editions. In Kristin Waters’s and Carol B. Conaway’s landmark edited collection, Black Women’s Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds, sophisticated commentary on this rich body of work chronicles a powerful and interwoven legacy of activism based in social and political theories that helped shape the history of North America. The book meticulously reclaims this American legacy, providing a collection of critical analyses of the primary sources and their vital traditions. Written by leading scholars, Black Women’s Intellectual Traditions is particularly powerful in its exploration of the pioneering thought and action of the nineteenth-century Black woman lecturer and essayist Maria W. Stewart, abolitionist Sojourner Truth, novelist and poet Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, educator Anna Julia Cooper, newspaper editor Mary Ann Shadd Cary, and activist Ida B. Wells. The distinguished contributors are Hazel V. Carby, Patricia Hill Collins, Karen Baker-Fletcher, Kristin Waters, R. Dianne Bartlow, Carol B. Conaway, Olga Idriss Davis, Vanessa Holford Diana, Evelyn Simien, Janice W. Fernheimer, Michelle N. Garfield, Joy James, Valerie Palmer-Mehta, Carla L. Peterson, Marilyn Richardson, Evelyn M. Simien, Ebony A. Utley, Mary Helen Washington, Melina Abdullah, and Lena Ampadu. The volume will interest scholars and readers of African-American and women’s studies, history, rhetoric, literature, poetry, sociology, political science, and philosophy. This updated edition features a new preface by the editors in the light of new developments in current scholarship.

  • Black Writers of the Founding Era: A Library of America Anthology

    edited by James G. Basker

    $40.00

    A radical new vision of the nation's founding era and a major act of historical recovery 

    Featuring more than 120 writers, this groundbreaking anthology reveals the astonishing richness and diversity of Black experience in the turbulent decades of the American Revolution


    Black Writers of the Founding Era is the most comprehensive anthology ever published of Black writing from the turbulent decades surrounding the birth of the United States. An unprecedented archive of historical sources––including more than 200 poems, letters, sermons, newspaper advertisements, slave narratives, testimonies of faith and religious conversion, criminal confessions, court transcripts, travel accounts, private journals, wills, petitions for freedom, even dreams, by over 100 authors––it is a collection that reveals the surprising richness and diversity of Black experience in the new nation.

    Here are writers both enslaved and free, loyalist and patriot, female and male, northern and southern; soldiers, seamen, and veterans; painters, poets, accountants, orators, scientists, community organizers, preachers, restaurateurs and cooks, hairdressers, criminals, carpenters, and many more. Along with long-famous works like Phillis Wheatley’s poems and Benjamin Banneker’s astonishing mathematical and scientific puzzles are dozens of first-person narratives offering little-known Black perspectives on the events of the times, like the Boston Massacre and the death of George Washington.

    From their bold and eloquent contributions to public debates about the meanings of the revolution and the values of the new nation–– writings that dramatize the many ways in which protest, activism, and community organizing have been integral to the Black American experience from the beginning––to their intimate thoughts preserved in private diaries and letters, some unseen to the present day, the words of the many writers gathered here will indelibly alter our understandings of American history. 

    A foreword by Annette Gordon-Reed and an introduction by James G. Basker, along with introductory headnotes and explanatory notes drawing on cutting edge scholarship, illuminate these writers’ works and to situate them in their historical contexts.

    A 16-page color photo insert presents portraits of some of the writers included and images of the original manuscripts, broadside, and books in which their words have been preserved.

  • Black, Queer, and Untold: A New Archive of Designers, Artists, and Trailblazers

    by Jon Key

    $35.00

    Growing up in Seale, Alabama as a Black Queer kid, then attending the Rhode Island School of Design as an undergraduate, Jon Key hungered to see himself in the fields of Art and Design. But in lectures, critiques, and in the books he read, he struggled to see and learn about people who intersected with his identity or who GOT him. So he started asking himself questions:

    What did it mean to be a graphic designer with his point of view? What did it mean to be a Black graphic designer? A Queer graphic designer? Someone from the South? Could his identity be communicated through a poster or a book? How could identity be archived in a design canon that has consistently erased contributions by designers who were not white, straight, and male?

    In Black, Queer, & Untold, acclaimed designer and artist Jon Key answers these questions and manifests the book he and so many others wish they had when they were coming up. He pays tribute to the incredible designers, artists, and people who came before and provides them an enduring, reverential stage – and in so doing, gifts us a book that takes its place among the creative arts canon. 

  • Black-Eyed Peas and Hoghead Cheese: A Story of Food, Family, and Freedom

    by Glenda Armand

    $18.99

    A little girl helping her grandmother prepare a holiday meal learns about the origins of soul food in this powerful picture book that celebrates African American cuisine and identity from an award-winning author.

    Know what I like most about Grandma’s kitchen?
    More than jambalaya? More than sweet potato pie? Even more than pralines?
    Grandma’s stories! Every meal Grandma cooks comes with a story.
    What will today’s story be?

    While visiting her grandma in Louisiana, nine-year-old Frances is excited to help prepare the New Year’s Day meal. She listens as Grandma tells stories—dating back to the Atlantic Slave Trade—about the food for their feast. Through these stories, Frances learns not only about the ingredients and the dishes they are making but about her ancestors and their history as well. 
     
    A celebration of the stories that connect us, this picture book urges us to think about the foods we eat and why we eat them. This book was inspired by the author's own childhood and includes her family's very own recipe for pralines in the back!

  • Blackdom, New Mexico: The Significance of the Afro-Frontier, 1900–1930

    by Timothy E. Nelson

    $26.95

    Blackdom, New Mexico, was a township that lasted aboutthirty years. In this book, Timothy E. Nelson situates the township’s storywhere it belongs: along the continuum of settlement in Mexico’s Northern Frontier.Dr. Nelson illuminates the set of conscious efforts that helped Black pioneersdevelop Blackdom Township into a frontier boomtown.

    “Blackdom” started as an inherited idea of a nineteenth-centuryAfrotopia. The idea of creating a Blackdom was refined within Blackinstitutions as part of the perpetual movement of Black Colonization. In 1903,thirteen Black men, encouraged by the 1896 Plessy decision, formed the BlackdomTownsite Company and set out to make Blackdom a real place in New Mexico, wherethey were outside the reach of Jim Crow laws.

    Many believed that Blackdom was simply abandoned. However,new evidence shows that the scheme to build generational wealth continued toexist throughout the twentieth century in other forms. During Blackdom’s boomtimes,in December 1919, Blackdom Oil Company shifted town business from aregenerative agricultural community to a more extractive model. Nelson hasuncovered new primary source materials that suggest for Blackdom a newlydiscovered third decade. This story has never been fully told or contextualizeduntil now.

    Reoriented to Mexico’s “northern frontier,” oneobserves Black ministers, Black military personnel, and Black freemasons whocolonized as part of the transmogrification of Indigenous spaces into theAmerican West. Nelson’s concept of the Afro-Frontier evokes a “Turnerian West,”but it is also fruitfully understood as a Weberian “Borderland.” Its history highlightsa brief period and space that nurtured Black cowboy culture. While Blackdom’scivic presence was not lengthy, its significance—and that of the Afro-Frontier—isan important window in the history of Afrotopias, Black Consciousness, and thenotion of an American West.
  • Blackouts: A Novel

    by Justin Torres

    $20.00

    From the bestselling author of We the Animals, Blackouts mines lost histories—personal and collective.

    Out in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly but who has haunted the edges of his life: Juan Gay. Playful raconteur, child lost and found and lost, guardian of the institutionalized, Juan has a project to pass along, one built around a true artifact of a book—Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns—and its devastating history. This book contains accounts collected in the early twentieth century from queer subjects by a queer researcher, Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was then co-opted by a committee, her name buried. The voices of these subjects have been filtered, muted, but it is possible to hear them from within and beyond the text, which, in Juan’s tattered volumes, has been redacted with black marker on nearly every page. As Juan waits for his end, he and the narrator recount for each other moments of joy and oblivion; they resurrect loves, lives, mothers, fathers, minor heroes. In telling their own stories and the story of the book, they resist the ravages of memory and time. The past is with us, beside us, ahead of us; what are we to create from its gaps and erasures?

    A book about storytelling—its legacies, dangers, delights, and potential for change—and a bold exploration of form, art, and love, Justin Torres’s Blackouts uses fiction to see through the inventions of history and narrative. A marvel of creative imagination, it draws on testimony, photographs, illustrations, and a range of influences as it insists that we look long and steadily at what we have inherited and what we have made—a world full of ghostly shadows and flashing moments of truth. A reclamation of ransacked history, a celebration of defiance, and a transformative encounter, Blackouts mines the stories that have been kept from us and brings them into the light.

  • Blacks and Blackness in Central America: Between Race and Place

    by Lowell Gudmundson and Justin Wolfe

    $30.95

    Many of the earliest Africans to arrive in the Americas came to Central America with Spanish colonists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and people of African descent constituted the majority of nonindigenous populations in the region long thereafter. Yet in the development of national identities and historical consciousness, Central American nations have often countenanced widespread practices of social, political, and regional exclusion of blacks. The postcolonial development of mestizo or mixed-race ideologies of national identity have systematically downplayed African ancestry and social and political involvement in favor of Spanish and Indian heritage and contributions. In addition, a powerful sense of place and belonging has led many peoples of African descent in Central America to identify themselves as something other than African American, reinforcing the tendency of local and foreign scholars to see Central America as peripheral to the African diaspora in the Americas. The essays in this collection begin to recover the forgotten and downplayed histories of blacks in Central America, demonstrating the centrality of African Americans to the region’s history from the earliest colonial times to the present. They reveal how modern nationalist attempts to define mixed-race majorities as “Indo-Hispanic,” or as anything but African American, clash with the historical record of the first region of the Americas in which African Americans not only gained the right to vote but repeatedly held high office, including the presidency, following independence from Spain in 1821.

    Contributors. Rina Cáceres Gómez, Lowell Gudmundson, Ronald Harpelle, Juliet Hooker, Catherine Komisaruk, Russell Lohse, Paul Lokken, Mauricio Meléndez Obando, Karl H. Offen, Lara Putnam, Justin Wolfe

  • Blacks and Jews in America : An Invitation to Dialogue

    by Terrence L. Johnson and Jacques Berlinerblau

    Sold out

    A Black-Jewish dialogue lifts a veil on these groups’ unspoken history, changing a narrative often dominated by the Grand Alliance and its fracturing. By engaging this history from our country’s origins to the present, Blacks and Jews in America models the honest and searching conversation needed for Blacks and Jews to forge a new understanding.

    A Black-Jewish dialogue lifts a veil on these groups’ unspoken history, shedding light on the challenges and promises facing American democracy from its inception to the present

    In this uniquely structured conversational work, two scholars—one of African American politics and religion, and one of contemporary American Jewish culture—explore a mystery: Why aren't Blacks and Jews presently united in their efforts to combat white supremacy? As alt-right rhetoric becomes increasingly normalized in public life, the time seems right for these one-time allies to rekindle the fires of the civil rights movement.

    Blacks and Jews in America investigates why these two groups do not presently see each other as sharing a common enemy, let alone a political alliance. Authors Terrence L. Johnson and Jacques Berlinerblau consider a number of angles, including the disintegration of the “Grand Alliance” between Blacks and Jews during the civil rights era, the perspective of Black and Jewish millennials, the debate over Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, and the Israel-Palestine conflict.

    Ultimately, this book shows how the deep roots of the Black-Jewish relationship began long before the mid-twentieth century, changing a narrative dominated by the Grand Alliance and its subsequent fracturing. By engaging this history from our country’s origins to its present moment, this dialogue models the honest and searching conversation needed for Blacks and Jews to forge a new understanding.

  • Blacktop Wasteland

    by S.A. Cosby

    from $16.99
    A husband, a father, a son, a business owner…And the best getaway driver east of the Mississippi.
    Beauregard “Bug” Montage is an honest mechanic, a loving husband, and a hard-working dad. Bug knows there’s no future in the man he used to be: known from the hills of North Carolina to the beaches of Florida as the best wheelman on the East Coast.


    He thought he'd left all that behind him, but as his carefully built new life begins to crumble, he finds himself drawn inexorably back into a world of blood and bullets. When a smooth-talking former associate comes calling with a can't-miss jewelry store heist, Bug feels he has no choice but to get back in the driver's seat. And Bug is at his best where the scent of gasoline mixes with the smell of fear.

    Haunted by the ghost of who he used to be and the father who disappeared when he needed him most, Bug must find a way to navigate this blacktop wasteland...or die trying.

    Like Ocean’s Eleven meets Drive, with a Southern noir twist, S. A. Cosby’s Blacktop Wasteland is a searing, operatic story of a man pushed to his limits by poverty, race, and his own former life of crime.

  • Blahom: A Warrior Goddess (Blahom #1)

    by April Q Russell

    $12.99

    Ships in 7-10 business days

    Despite the long war that rages around her, Blahom leads a sheltered but enviable life as a young Black royal until everything is shattered by a shocking vision and a single act of deception.

    Beautiful, poised, and adored by the Zaed society her family rules over, Blahom has spent her young life preparing for her future as a ruler and royal. The war between her people, who value a connection to God and culture, and the Delions, who aim to rule Sirius with technology, has raged on for years-but since the disappearance of a cousin and countless other women in her community, the stakes have suddenly become higher...and much more personal.

    Lacking solutions for how to end the conflict, Blahom's mother shares a plan to end the war that was revealed to her in a visionary dream -if only her family would agree. As the rulers-including Blahom's younger sister Katyana and fierce warrior brother Vasco-come to accept their changing roles in the battles to come, the brief moment of hope is shattered by a shocking murder that strikes at the core of Blahom's inner circle. Touching off a hero's journey that sees Blahom and her sister come to embrace their strength and power to defend their beautiful land, the two young women will endure grueling training, skepticism, tragedy, and risk a young new love in order to save their people and way of life.

    With unforgettable characters, sizzling romance, and page-turning suspense, Blahom: A Warrior Goddess is the first book in a new, richly inventive urban fantasy series that marks the debut of author April Q. Russell. It certainly won't be the last.

  • Blake, or The Huts of America

    by Martin R. Delany

    $10.99

    *ships/available for pickup in 7-10 business days

    New edition of Delany's classic pre US Civil war slavery tale which follows an escaped slave who tries to ignite insurrection against the de-humanizing institutions of depravation.

    New edition with a new introduction. Delany's tale of Blake, an escaped slave in the era before the US Civil War, depicts the harrowing detail of life under slavery and offers a call to action for resistance. Casting beyond the misery of slavery, Delany's novel, located in the Southern United States and Cuba, demonstrates that alternatives are possible if only widespread insurrection could be ignited. A new title in the Foundations of Black Science Fiction series.

  • Blaque Pearle

    by Tarris Marie

    $16.95

    Ships in 7-10 business days

    Before her Hollywood dreams were shattered, Pearle Monalise Brown was the tenacious aspiring actress from Compton's unforgiving, scarred streets. Never broken, Pearle switches gears to a fallback plan—resorting to her beauty and acting skills to swindle money and expensive jewels. When she's hired by the Colombian cartel to steal a priceless Basquiat from the debonair kingpin and art collector, Blaque, her talents might not be enough to keep her from falling into a trap she never saw coming. 

    Blaque is sagacious and handsome—not to mention the legacy of two powerful organized crime families: the Laurent’s—known dons hailing from Kingston, Jamaica, and the Savage’s—a sophisticated syndicate with criminal enterprises across the U.S. As Blaque and Pearle become passionately entangled, Pearle falls prey to a darker underworld. Time is ticking. Lives are at stake. Will these love outlaws be able to outsmart their enemies, or will they wage an all-out war, leaving the bodies to fall wherever they may?

  • Blend

    by Mashonda Tifrere

    $18.00

    *ships in 7-10 business days* 

     

    A wise and inspiring guide to creating a happy and healthy blended family by Mashonda Tifrere with contributions from her co-parents--Swizz Beatz and his wife, Grammy-Award winning singer and songwriter Alicia Keys.

    In January 2010, founder of ArtLeadHer Mashonda Tifrere and
    legendary record producer Swizz Beatz finalized their divorce. When Swizz married award-winning singer/songwriter Alicia Keys, a new dynamic was born--three adults who loved and were deeply committed to raising Mashonda and Swizz's four-year old son Kasseem. In Blend, Tifrere draws on the insights they gained from their journey as well as advice from family therapists, parenting experts, and other blending families, to provide an invaluable resource for blended families.

    Statistics show that one in three Americans is now a step-parent, stepchild, step-sibling or other member of a blended family. The number of first time marriages or romantic relationships that end in divorce or breakups and the high percentage of remarriages and new relationships that involve children demand a unique, life-affirming approach to processing the end of one relationship and the rebirth of a new familial dynamic with the well-being of children at its center. In this book, Tifrere shares intimate details on how she and her co-parents used communication, patience and love to create an environment where they were able to work as a team and all the children involved could thrive.

    Blend will inspire a generation of families.
  • Bless the Blood: A Cancer Memoir

    by Walela Nehanda

    $19.99

    *ships in 7 - 10 days*

    A searing debut YA poetry and essay collection about a Black cancer patient who faces medical racism after being diagnosed with leukemia in their early twenties, for fans of Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals and Laurie Halse Anderson's Shout. When Walela is diagnosed at twenty-three with advanced stage blood cancer, they're suddenly thrust into the unsympathetic world of tubes and pills, doctors who don’t use their correct pronouns, and hordes of "well-meaning" but patronizing people offering unsolicited advice as they navigate rocky personal relationships and share their story online. But this experience also deepens their relationship to their ancestors, providing added support from another realm. Walela's diagnosis becomes a catalyst for their self-realization. As they fill out forms in the insurance office in downtown Los Angeles or travel to therapy in wealthier neighborhoods, they begin to understand that cancer is where all forms of their oppression intersect: Disabled. Fat. Black. Queer. Nonbinary. In Bless the Blood: A Cancer Memoir, the author details a galvanizing account of their survival despite the U.S. medical system, and of the struggle to face death unafraid.

  • Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head

    by Warsan Shire

    $17.00

    Poems of migration, womanhood, trauma, and resilience from the celebrated collaborator on Beyoncé’s Lemonade and Black Is King, award-winning Somali British poet Warsan Shire.

  • Blessings and Disasters: A Story of Alabama

    Alexis Okeowo

    $28.99

    From a New Yorker staff writer and PEN award winner, a blend of memoir, history, and reportage on one of the most complex and least understood states in America.

    “In Alabama, we exist at the border of blessing and disaster….”

    Alexis Okeowo grew up in Montgomery―the former seat of the Confederacy―as the daughter of Nigerian immigrants. Here, she weaves her family’s story with Alabama’s, defying stereotypes about her endlessly complex, often-pigeonholed home state. She immerses us in a landscape dominated today not by cotton fields but by Amazon warehouses, encountering high-powered Christian business leaders lobbying for tribal sovereignty and small-town women coming out against conservative politics. Okeowo shows how people can love their home while still acknowledging its sins.

    In this perspective-shifting work that is both an intimate memoir and a journalistic triumph, Okeowo investigates her life, other Alabamians’ lives, and the state’s lesser-known histories to examine why Alabama has been the stage for the most extreme results of the American experiment.

  • Blessings: A Novel

    by Chukwuebuka Ibeh

    from $17.00

    Moonlight meets Purple Hibiscus in this searing debut of self-acceptance, sexual awakening, and first love set in a Nigeria on the verge of criminalizing same-sex relationships

    Obiefuna has always been the black sheep of his family—sensitive where his father, Anozie, is pragmatic, a dancer where his brother, Ekene, is a natural athlete. But when Obiefuna’s father witnesses an intimate moment between his teenage son and another boy, his deepest fears are confirmed, and Obiefuna is banished to boarding school.

    As he navigates his new school’s strict hierarchy and unpredictable violence, Obiefuna both finds and hides who he truly is. Back home, his mother, Uzoamaka, must contend with the absence of her beloved son, her husband’s cryptic reasons for sending him away, and the hard truths that they’ve all been hiding from. As Nigeria teeters on the brink of criminalizing same-sex relationships, Obiefuna’s identity becomes more dangerous than ever before, and the life he wants drifts further out of reach.

    Set in post-military Nigeria and culminating in the Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act of 2013, Blessings is an elegant and exquisitely moving story that asks how to live freely in a country that forbids one’s truest self, and what it takes for love to flourish despite it all.

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